This remastered Legacy Edition of ‘Grace’ is a beautifully packaged artefact with an extra disc’s worth of contemporaneous out-takes and rarities, plus a DVD documentary about the making of that extraordinary debut album. The extras are of course optional. There’s a take on Leiber and Stoller’s ‘Alligator Wine’ that takes its cue from Screamin’ Jay but adds Skip James’ brawn. Leon Payne’s ‘Lost Highway’ erroneously attributed to H. Williams on the sleeve) sounds like the future ghost of Jeff being haunted by the past ghost of Hank. Bukka White’s ‘Parchman Farm’ is rendered as a respectable period piece before slithering into a chilling and thrilling Robert Johnson.

Alex Chilton’s ‘Kanga Roo’ is a fractious indulgence that tries for No Wave improv but is spoiled by rehearsal room Rock School chops, while an amped up ‘Eternal Life’ is a portrait of the young artist subjecting his voice to a flinch-inducing self-harming process, as though ashamed of its beauty, with crap widdly-widdly solos rubbing salt on the nodes. But the grab-bag nature of these cannot detract from the main feature. Jeff Buckley was a class act, we all know that, and the band assembled for the Bearsville sessions were more than capable (hear how the players get under those slippery dream-to-nightmare changes in ‘So Real’). But you can’t downplay guitarist Gary Lucas’s input, specifically the brace of tunes that survived the short-lived Gods & Monsters project. His co-writes of the wild and mercurial title tune and ‘Mojo Pin’ remain the cornerstone of the album: huge, majestic Presence-era Zep dynamics, the guitarist’s neo-baroque arpeggios acting as the perfect backdrop to Buckley’s Plant-goes-Hindu castrato vocal, channelling something most of his contemporaries didn’t even know existed. But then Buckley was a beautiful boy who could somehow play the hard rock cocksman and the pubescent girl entertaining Viking stud fantasies a la Tori Amos – not so much homo as narcissus-erotic. And the reason ‘Grace’ still towers over its host of imitators like a great citadel is the labyrinth of musics contained within its vaults. Not only did Buckley inherit his father Tim’s fascination with French chanteuse, he also possessed far more than a working knowledge of Van, Nina Simone, Nusrat, Delta blues, Memphis soul, Bulgarian sacred chant and This Mortal Coil. He was that rare thing, a fine writer who took the art of interpretive singing deadly seriously.

On that level, ‘Lilac Wine’ mated the Simone template with Edith Piaf and John Paul Jones’ mellotron strings from ‘Rain Song’. It’s a callous man or woman who can hear him sing, “I drink much more than I oughta drink/Because it brings me back you” and remain dry around the eye. By the same token, his reading of Benjamin Britten’s ‘Corpus Christi Carol’ is a shimmering and shocking boy soprano recital the cassocked villain from Almodovar’s Bad Education might recognise all too well, while his ‘Hallelujah’ is the definitive interpretation of El Cohen’s scripture, perfectly pitched between lust and liturgy. As for his own ‘Last Goodbye’, this tune will evermore be mourning song and last rite for young lovers playing out their own Paris-in-spring/Prague-in-autumn mythologies.

There are enough sighs here to make a mistral.

‘Grace’ is holy music.

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.